April 9, 2018 @ 9:57 am

In this week's show we talk about life, death, and Aaron's determination to live forever to buy all the comics. We offer no apologies for our absence, make no promises on our regular return, and as usual, wax philosophical on the minutia you missed.

Andrea will be at DiNK! this coming weekend if you want to say hi in person. Aaron will likely be at some flea market in Oregon acquiring yet more comics for his collection. Some things never change.

September 7, 2015 @ 12:01 pm

This week’s theme is starting from scratch. We took two months off this summer, but we're back, and the show is back, and we have no idea if it’s going to be like riding a bike or like learning a new language. We picked three first issues just to hit the proverbial hammer even harder. And because nothing reminds Andrea of old times more than arguing with Aaron over gender roles and representation in the media, all three titles feature a diverse lineup of strong, complicated, vulnerable, messy, passionate female characters. You know, like actual people.

June 29, 2015 @ 10:22 pm

This week’s theme is kill yourself. Seriously, that’s what Aaron texted when Andrea asked him. What a dick. Alternate title would be something like making a deal with the devil, kinda like the arrangement our co-hosts have.

This week on The Couch we welcome back Eisner-nominated writer, illustrator and graphic artist Brian Wood. We talked to him in Episode 26 last year. Since then, he’s been pretty prolific: wrapping up his creator-owned series The Massive, published by Dark Horse, debuting his new series Rebels with artist Andrea Mutti, also published by Dark Horse, and just last week, the first issue of Starve hit stores, drawn by Danijel Zezelj and published by Image Comics. Brian has also written X-Men and Moon Knight for Marvel and Star Wars and Conan for Dark Horse. His series Demo, with artist Becky Cloonan, was recently released in a collected edition by Vertigo.

June 8, 2015 @ 7:16 pm

Guys, reality bites. It’s a common theme in media - it’s the driving force in so much storytelling, from musicals to movies to television to comics. And we talk about that a lot on the show. This week, we’re focusing in a little more closely on the the characters themselves, who, (to pull again from musical theater because Andrea writes these notes and so she make the rules) are characters waiting for life to begin. On the cusp of greatness, but not necessarily mean that in a positive way. Something’s coming. I don’t know what it is is but it is gonna be great. It’s gonna change lives. In one way or another.

May 18, 2015 @ 7:24 pm

Two comics from May 6 and May 13, 2015. Plus a Second Opinion, featuring questions answered by a different listener each week, with Avi Chetlin.

Show Notes:This week we’re talking about the realities we build for ourselves, and what happens when the walls come crashing down. Comics, video games, drugs, love. It’s all the same. Literally an opiate for the masses. Sometimes we work so hard to construct the world we want to believe is real, it’s all the more painful when the fantasy refuses to usurp real life permanently. And other times we’re so convinced by the illusion, that the reveal that it’s merely fantasy catches us entirely off guard.

May 4, 2015 @ 6:39 pm

Three comics books from April 29, 2015. Plus a Second, Opinion, featuring questions answered by a different listener each week, with Ben Diederich.

Show Notes:

This week we’re talking about Avengers and New Avengers, the current runs of which will go down in history as the best large scale comic event ever. With issues #44 and #33 respectively, we end three years of complex build up of multiple storylines and infinite characters all leading to Secret Wars.

And in contrast, we’re also going to talk about Alex + Ada #14, which is about as different from an event comic as you can get. Understated, emotional growth between primarily two characters. Aaron suggested the theme be “there can be only one”, a tongue in cheek reference to a single Earth left in Avengers. But Andrea countered with “it takes two”, or three or four or twenty-seven. There’s plenty of room for all kinds of comics. Let’s dive into these polar opposites and see what we see.

April 25, 2015 @ 9:33 pm

Welcome to A Very Special Episode of Comics Therapy. This week we’re looking at some of the themes of identity brought up in All New X-Men, as well as their implications for representation in comics as a whole. We've never deliberately spent an entire show discussing a single book, but sometimes things happen in the world that we can’t ignore, and the existing plan goes out the window. Consider this our Isaac & Ishmael, hopefully with slightly less pretension, but with many of the same intentions.